The Other Side Of The Tracks
by frimfram

Chapter One: All Change

The roof of heaven was low and dark. So dark that William took a while to realise that his eyes had opened: Heaven was close and smelled sweet and musky and dry and he lay still, trying not to breathe. His mouth was filled with a strange taste like coins. His body was cold. He was not sure he ever expected to have a body in Heaven.

Heaven had a population of two. He heard her somewhere away in the darkness to his left, singing softly, delicate words he couldn't catch. In Heaven's still gloom, the only things moving were that spiralling, fragmented tune and something inside him that seemed to be the same shape, that strained toward the sound. William sat up for the first time.

"Rise and shine." The angel was sitting in pools of shadow, dealing tarot cards on a raised stone slab. She passed her hand three times over the stub of a candle planted in a dish, and looked him over as no one ever had before. She smiled at him with luminous eyes in a pinched white face. "You sleep like the dead," she breathed. "But you're something better."

She was the most terrible and beautiful thing William had ever seen. He could do nothing but stare as the candlelight guttered on the angel's face, each shifting shadow transforming her from baby doll to child to goddess to ghost. Loose, dark brown curls fell in wayward twists over her shoulders, down onto her chest where a severe, dated dress crushed her breasts. There, above the low neckline, he saw a fresh, straight scar. Memory filled his head instantly: the taste of her blood, light searing inside his mind, her skin cool against his lips, her teeth in his throat. A feeling that made him think he wasn't William gripped him and he felt a growl rise in his chest. He didn't know anything, he only felt: he wanted to taste blood again. He wanted to die again under her mouth.

Heaven had an angel, but she had no golden book with his name and the list of his sins and virtues noted down. Instead, she smiled at his growl, simple and wicked, and asked him "What's your name?"

He could hardly remember, and his tongue lay dry and heavy in his mouth. "William," he replied, without a stutter. Dimly he tried to recall prayers and grave words, the vestiges of half-listened-to sermons, or even the polite way to make a lady's acquaintance. His brain was useless, though, overwhelmed by a raging desire that locked his eyes to her.

"Sweet William." She rose and came to him, her thin body swaying and her movements the steps to an unknown dance. Taking his face between her hands, she traced his features with light chill fingers that pressed his brow and sent a strange shiver through his skin. He raised his own hand to find its source and felt his forehead cold and hard, furrowed with deep unfamiliar ridges. The question he began to ask stopped in his mouth when the beautiful woman's own face changed, and she parted her lips into a terrible smile. Then she leaned in and kissed him deeply, violently, and he felt the sharp teeth in his mouth before he was drunk on her kissing, on the feel of the mouth that had changed everything for him. As he was on the brink of losing himself she pulled away, held out a cordial hand, and pronounced "Drusilla."

He looked at her stupidly for a moment before taking her cool fingers in his. "Drusilla," he repeated, intoxicated. "I want..."

"Everything," she cut in. "Beautiful things, hot things, things with fast pulses, life struggling in your arms. Blood. You shall have them. I shall take you."

Heaven made him hungry. Drusilla pulled him to his feet, catching him with an arm under his when he found his legs shaky and weak. He looked around cautiously and realised that Heaven had names carved elegantly into its stone walls, the remains of dried leaves on its cold floor, and a guardian in the form of an angel who looked much more like the ones in books. This angel was marble, rooted to a plinth, and presided over the scene with sightless eyes. On the plinth the words IN MEMORIAM stood out in ostentatious inscription.

Heaven was just a tomb. A grandiose, large, distinctly un-Anglican looking tomb, which made him frown, turn to Drusilla and begin to speak. She pressed a cool finger to his lips. "Not yours, silly. You'll never be found." She giggled, innocent and strange. "This is my little nest. Kept you here out of the way of those nasty other ones, til you were shiny and new. Daddy's too rough for you for now." Her whole body shook jerkily. "But not for long. I see you strong and handsome, better than him. Brighter, blacker little fire. You'll care for me."

"I will," said William fervently. It was strange, the things he was sure of. Drusilla smiled and drew him in for a chaste kiss on the lips which made William forget about Heaven. "You're cold," he said, struggling out of his greatcoat and draping it over her slender shoulders, receiving in return a smile both tender and amused. "And you're hungry," she breathed. "Shall we find a snack? Tea at the Midland Grand?"

His new face seemed to slide into a sneer easily.

"You're hungry for something else," said Drusilla. "Don't worry. You shall feed all your appetites. A picnic. Little fine bone cups." He looked into her black eyes, mesmerised. The look in them was faraway, or even more: a dreadful depth into which he felt he could fall himself. Abruptly, she snapped back and seemed to see right into him, to where something stronger and more urgent had replaced his soul.

"Shall we?" They held hands daintily, for all the passion and energy and lust screaming inside of him, and stepped out across the graveyard. Heaven, it transpired, was in an unfashionable district near King's Cross.

The Midland Grand Hotel stretched for impossible distances along Euston Road, so many storeys high that the purplish night sky snagged on its Gothic turrets. It was brand new and bold, the dark centre of a new universe. Drusilla beamed like a little girl as they strolled in caricatured sobriety, hand in hand, along the length of its curved façade. She liked hotels, and this huge new one was the finest. She tipped her head back to take it all in: gargoyles grimacing from the imposing front of the recently-opened St Pancras Station, gas light spilling out of hundreds of windows, genteel laughter from the balcony of the Ladies' Drawing Room. Silhouetted figures lounged at the windows, framed in the arches of glass, their gestures all studied, moneyed poise.

William would have been cowed: London's most opulent hotel, chic and vast and decadent, harder for a starving poet to enter than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, or something like that. Even the beautiful women of his little circle, so elegant and unattainable in the drawing-rooms of his wretched acquaintances' houses, would have looked dowdy and humble in this palace. On reflection, something about this made him smile wickedly. The dead William seemed to lack compunction.

"A giant wedding cake!" sing-songed Drusilla. "Care for a bite?" She leaned close to William and kissed his neck, above the healing puncture wound, making him tremble. She paused at the foot of the stairway leading to the entrance and William watched the golden light pouring all around her, swathed in the halo he'd expected her to have from the start. Stepping backwards, holding him by both hands, she started carefully up the hotel steps.

Two stiff doormen observed the strange couple measuredly as they entered, but made no move to stop them. Guarding the door of the newest, plushest hotel in London was not a job for a fool. Both of these men were seasoned and mature, and had learned infallible judgement through years of seeing everything. They trusted themselves when something in their guts told them to say nothing to this strange couple, though there was something distinctly ... undesirable about them. The man's clothes, for a start: rather poor for the usual clientele, and very dishevelled. Both had consumptively pale countenances, not that that was so unusual in London. Still, all it took was one stare from the woman's ardent, dark eyes, and the doormen stood to attention and held open the elegantly glazed doors. The woman smiled a smile a little too secretive to be demure, and the couple passed through. As the porter on the left closed the door behind them, his companion opened his mouth to say something. But he thought better of it, and returned to staring stoutly out onto the street.

The entrance hall was far beyond imposing. From the centre of the foyer the grand staircase rose in a languid spiral, winding upwards to the distant blue ceiling with its constellation of painted stars. Parlour palms stood to attention, stiff and wise as the doormen, against the rich maroon walls. People attending to agreeable business whirled through the hall purposefully in an unconscious waltz. The colour hit William like a thunderclap, more dizzying than the unlikely tones in a tinted photograph: rich yellow light (the hotel was dazzlingly all-electric), a girl's warm red hair, the deep emerald of the bellhops' uniforms, that cerulean ceiling high above that might have been Heaven after all. Inside himself he felt something strong and powerful stirring. He had never felt so very present, yet attracted so little notice. No one turned to challenge the strange intruders in this grand place. Nobody looked askance or flicked him one of those sickening, familiar stares, all pity and contempt. In fact, no one seemed to notice them at all: whenever someone looked in their direction, their eyes seemed to glance away again instantly, registering nothing. He looked at Drusilla at his side, feeling a kind of subtle energy in the cool grip of her hand on his. "We're behind a veil, my darling," she told him. "They're too stupid to see. A world of fools. But oh, such pretty fools..."

She led him into the coffee lounge, a gorgeous room with a long bar and marbled pillars of red and emerald supporting the ornately decorated ceiling. At a table, a group of men sat smoking and talking. One punctuated each sentence he spoke with a little jab of a folded newspaper, the headline furled unreadable between his fingers: Seventh disappearance in Euston. Police suspect gang. She slipped an arm around William's waist and he breathed out a low gasp. "Do you like it?" she murmured in his ear, indicating the room with her slender hand.

"Oh, yes," breathed William, like a child admiring its birthday present. Every conversation in the room plucked at him like fingers tugging his clothes, drawing him in a thousand directions, flavoured with a thousand desires and hungers, and the sure and certain hope that they would all be satisfied.

A waiter with slick hair, heavy eyelids and a lithe, slender body advanced across the room with a glass of tea, a soda water and two slices of sachertorte on a silver tray. Drusilla slid her eyes toward him, then back to William, and ran the tip of her tongue over her top lip. He stopped at a table where two women looking like overblown roses in their abundant dresses were sitting, talking and laughing. "There, my darling," Drusilla told him in a low voice. "Time for tea." The crisp waiter set down the cups and plates then withdrew, turning smoothly on his heel to return to the kitchen. Drusilla and William followed.

He noticed them when they passed through the panelled door that led to the kitchen, and turned toward them. At first he looked perplexed. "I beg your pardon, sir and madam, but these are the kitchens." When neither replied, the waiter's brow furrowed sceptically and he peered at them with suspicion. "Guests are not allowed." Something changed in his voice and the supercilious curl of his lip made William's skin crawl. "Oh, but I was starting to feel at home," said William, as the potent rage in him burst out to the surface, his face clenched, and he grabbed the astonished waiter by the shoulders. He twisted the man's head aside in an instant and sunk his teeth in deep.

The blood nearly blinded him. He felt obliterated, nothing but ravenous hunger and this sweet, sweet fulfilment. Heat filled him from within. Life burst his mind. The man's useless struggling turned into feeble jerking, then nothing. He drank and drank, dropping to the floor with his victim's body, until there was nothing left. He lay still, panting, until he realised there was no need.

Dru seated herself on the parquet beside him and cradled his head in her lap. She leaned over and kissed leftover blood from his lips, sliding her tongue deep into his mouth so that darts of heat stabbed down his body. He was coursing with power and stolen life. He got to his feet and swept Drusilla up into his arms. She laughed delightedly, crazily, then pressed a finger to William's lips. "Sshh, my darling, and we'll steal away." It was so absurd, the thought of creeping out quietly, when he was standing here hard and vivid and able to take on the world, that he broke her injunction and laughed aloud too. Still holding her in his arms he marched straight for the kitchen door and kicked it open. The kitchen was full of steam, heat and hissing. It was hard to see through the cooking fugue, and no one turned as the door opened. William, carrying Drusilla, strode for the scullery door which opened out onto the street. As they reached it, a young chef de commis looked up and gasped in horror, dropping his knife. Drusilla blew him a kiss and they gained the door, hopped down the steps and disappeared into the street.

In an alley just like the one where he died, William pressed Drusilla up against a wall and kissed her urgently. He was drunk on blood, dizzy and full of lust. The man he was days ago had disappeared somewhere beneath the tide of firework-bright sensations that the night had burst over him, and he touched Drusilla instinctively, hungrily. But when their eyes met something different rose up in him, something awed and dumbstruck, some poetic vestige that had never lived in his soul but was older than his death. His hands slowed on her hips.

He trembled as Drusilla opened his shirt at the collar and stroked the cold flesh there, as rhythmically and purposefully as if she was anointing him, pressing into movement the new blood in his pulseless veins. She touched him lower, stroking firmly, and brought a dark groan to his throat. Smiling blackly into his eyes, she unbuttoned his trousers. His eyelids flickered from the unbearable pleasure building under her subtle hands, and he fought to keep his gaze fused to hers. The impossible darkness in her eyes pulled him in and made him want to wrench away all at once. He began to gasp unnecessarily, his mouth hanging open hungrily and his lower lip trembling, as Drusilla hitched up her skirts and leaned back against the wall. She tilted her hips forward, took his hand, and wrapped it around her waist to steady her. Then she guided him inside. He shuddered uncontainably as he sank in deep, nearly bursting at the sweet sigh she breathed when he was in as far as he could go. He gripped her waist blindly, desperately, as if she could save him, and could not keep from thrusting, hard, reaching into the centre of her for this pleasure, this incredible pleasure, this rising expanding blooming throbbing aching perfect explosion of pleasure that blinded him as surely as blood. When his groans turned into near-screams Drusilla pressed her mouth over his, extinguishing the sounds. He came and collapsed against her, dropping his head onto her shoulder and shaking until there was nothing left of him.

She whispered beautiful insanities into his ear, but he never understood them. He felt again the exquisite pleasure of dying in her arms. He'd had no idea that death and sex were really so close as better poets had sneeringly told him.

When at last he could focus again, he saw her smiling at him. She kissed his smoothed forehead tenderly. "I will give you everything in the dark velvet world," she told him. "I see you inside, all black love and burning vision. Leather and smoke." She disengaged from him and passed a hand in front of his body as though drawing aside a curtain. "Love and undoing. Sweet ... harmony. Endless summers. Rejoicing. A vampire who likes the dawn."

"Vampire?"

"Oh my sweet." She kissed him again, lightly, and stroked his face, then returned to whispering insensibly into his scarred neck. William stared at the wall beyond her shoulder, failing to recover himself. It was strange to think there were names for all these ineffable wonders newly befallen him. He listened to Dru, but none of the words she offered made sense. He tried out 'love' and 'death' and thought of a few others that didn't make him blush like they ought to. It was strange. Words hadn't been his strong suit lately.

But he still wasn't certain that Heaven had been the wrong word.